In this lecture sponsored by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat describes how Israel has sought to expand its right to use force and diminish the Palestinian right to armed resistance in the language of law. Since November 2000 when Israel publicly embraced its assassination policy of Palestinians, it embarked on two fundamental and interlocking shifts. The first was to unsettle the applicable legal framework regulating the State’s relationship to Palestinians. The second was to change the laws of war that regulated a belligerent’s right to use force more generally. Together, these shifts worked to expand Israel’s use of force against Palestinians and to extinguish the specter of Palestinian military resistance. The fruits of these seeds planted in 2000 began to come into lethal bloom during Israel’s onslaughts against the Gaza Strip in Winter 2008/09 and the years to follow. The implications for these shifts are global because they are changing the laws of war as a matter of universal application, thus emboldening the use of force by states against non-state adversaries. The lecture is based on Noura’s research findings to be published in a book tentatively titled, Law as Politics in the Palestinian-Israel Conflict.
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